Blog of a course that allows students to learn how to use books, newspapers, magazines, journals, archives, databases, and the Internet to find and evaluate information on legendary creatures such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and other cryptids. It also encourages the developement of critical thinking skills to deal with extraordinary claims and ideas for thinking about them.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Wiki edit

I finally made my Wikipedia edits. It was difficult to figure out how to insert specific references (footnotes), but fortunately there are some helpful pages for people who have no clue what they are doing.

The edits I made were based off of a book by Loren Coleman that I wrote about in my post last week. They read:

Bigfoot researcher and cryptozoology author Loren Coleman wrote about a series of thunderbird sightings in the 1940s. On April 10, 1948, three individuals in Overland, Illinois spotted what they originally thought to be a passing plane, but after seeing a large set of flapping wings, they realized this "plane" was something very different. A few weeks later, in Alton, Illinois, a man and his son saw what they described as an enormous bird creature with a body shaped like a naval torpedo. The creature was flying at at least 500 feet and cast a shadow the same size as a small passenger airplane.[6]

Similar sightings around the same time in St. Louis, Missouri prompted residents to write concerned letters to then St. Louis mayor Aloys P. Kaufmann demanding that the city do something about these reportedly huge birds. The mayor instructed an administrative assistant to set a trap to catch one of the creatures, but when blue heron tracks were discovered on an island in the Meramec River, the mystery was considered solved.[7]

In addition, I added to some information that was already on the Wikipedia page for the thunderbird, specifically on a reported sighting in Alaska that was reported on by local press and picked up by CNN and Reuters. My additions to the following passage are in bold:

In 2002, a sighting of a large birdlike creature, with a wingspan of around 14 feet (4.3 m), was reported in Alaska.[9]The Anchorage Daily News reported witnesses describing the creature like something out of the movie Jurassic Park. Scientists suggested the giant bird may have simply been a Steller's sea eagle, which have a wingspan of 6–8 feet (1.8–2.4 m).There had also been previous reports of similar creatures in the same area around that time.

I will post next week on my edits to the thunderbird entry on the Monstropedia site.